About the Use of Concrete Damage Plasticity for Modeling Masonry Post-Elastic Behavior

Abstract

Considering the high vulnerability of existing masonry buildings, which often have strategic or cultural value, professionals and specialized engineers are frequently required to model complex historical buildings. The approaches proposed by National Building Codes may not always be suitable for such cases, but more detailed approaches are necessary, relying on FEM continuum modeling and inelastic constitutive law. There are many constitutive laws proposed in the literature that allow us to accurately reproduce the mechanical behavior of masonry. However, they require the identification of several parameters that are not easy to determine. In this study, a sensitivity analysis of the parameters of a nonlinear constitutive law very popular for masonry modeling (the “Concrete Damage Plasticity—CDP” model) is conducted, considering literature tests of masonry panels under shear stress as the benchmark. The aim is to assess the influence of the main parameters of the model and compare them to one of the more commonly used Mohr–Coulomb failure criteria.

Experimental Analysis and Numerical Modelling of the Mechanical Behavior of a Sisal-Fiber-Reinforced Geopolymer

“…To support and develop the adoption of natural-fiber-reinforced geopolymers (mortar and/or concrete) in the construction industry, it is fundamental to define a suitable and affordable numerical model of the mechanical behavior of the relevant material to be introduced in Finite Element Method (FEM) software allowing for an evaluation of the acting stress-strain fields. This aspect is worthy of investigation, and few papers have been devoted to this topic (see, e.g., [32][33][34][35][36]). The aim of this work is to a further progress in the numerical modelling of sisal-fiber-reinforced geopolymer mortar, starting from experimental tests (compressive, three-point bending and splitting tests) performed with different percentages of fiber reinforcement.…”